Frame stiffness has been increased in steering and pedalling terms with a tapered head tube and press-ﬁt bottom bracket joined together with a new tubeset. The Trance also gets a state-of-the-art, easy adjust, direct-mount rear brake, and Giant have lost a few grams of metal from the already light frame to make it competitive with a lot of carbon fibre chassis.

Despite hinting that we could expect something lower and longer prior to the refresh, Giant have done nothing different to the geometry of the previous Trance X, apart from adding 5mm to the fork travel to slacken things half a degree. There’s still a gap between the compact-feeling medium and the gate-like large frame, with Giant still not creating an intermediate M/L size despite its popularity since it was introduced to their road bike range.